However - if you go back to the end of last year the ICM figures have been40-3140-3040-2939-3037-30and now40-31.

So it would on the face of it look like the 37 figure for the tories was the outlier ...

... and the broad figures have been pretty consistent.

This seems to me to say that tory critics of Cameron have painted themselves into a corner. The harsh facts for tories is that we are in the middle of a good old pre-election boom. With not only interest rates at a totally unsustainable low (with inflation about to take off just after the election) but 200 billion of printed money thrown in. Labour are desperate to comatose the electorate to the devastating future as outlined in the deep print of their own PBR.

Labour have shored up some of their core support and the expenses scandal has boosted others. '40' for the Tories is pretty good. The LDs on the other hand - the alternate lefty party with Labour exposed as a total lying shambles have dropped share. They need to 'go figure'

1. Do ICM give the 6 seats, or is that what the uniform national swing worked out by the screws say? Not like a polling organisation to do that sort of extrapolation, rather than just give the data and let others draw the conclusions.

2. Quite a different poll from yougov in the (same group) S Times

3. @bond007 - you should know perfectly well that, aside from Labour understanding the rules better in the early 90s, most of the bias stems from the huge delay between use of data and an election on the revised boundaries - later this year we'll be using boundaries based on electoral data sourced from 9 years ago. Sort that (quicker boundary reviews or require the commission to predict population changes) and you'll have fixd as much of the bias as FPTP will ever allow you to (along with sorting out the Welsh question which only lops about 5 seats off the artificial Labour advantage)

Iain you should take a look at Andy Cooke's analysis over at pb.com, it would give the Tories a 60 seat majority with a 9 point lead. Take a look, it makes a lot of sense, and also explains a lot of lefty ire at Lord Ashcroft.

Yesterday's news was full of how, after bravely giving evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, Gordon promptly demonstrated his essential goodwill towards the armed forces by a spontaneous trip to Afghanistan, in which he quietly announced to the national media a load of, er, new expenditure, for the equipment the army has been requesting for the past seven years.

What's that phrase the Wizard of Oz used? The Munificent Oz? I don't really know what it means (a mixture of generous, all-knowing and magnanimous?) but I'm sure it's the precisely the word to describe how Gordon sees himself.